In Remembrance: Gregory Peck

     Gregory Peck, the handsome movie star who embodied charisma and a timeless cinematic dignity, has died. He died early morning on June 12, 2003 at his Los Angeles home. Peck's wife of 48 years, Veronique Passani was at his side. He was 87.

     Peck's charming good looks, dignified grace and gentlemanly demeanor established him as a leading man of Hollywood film.

     His film debut was in 1944's Days of Glory, and he'd soon be regarded as a star. Peck played a priest in his second film, Daryl Zanuck's Keys to the Kingdom, which brought his first Oscar nomination. He portrayed an amnesiac in Hitchcock's masterpiece Spellbound (1945). The Academy continued to recognize his acting efforts in the 1940s as he garnered a second nomination for his role in the 1946 family classic The Yearling. His portrayal of a reporter pretending to be Jewish to expose American anti-Semitism earned Peck his third Oscar nomination for 1947's Best Picture winner Gentleman's Agreement. The year 1949 was good for Peck as well, Twelve O’clock High starred Peck as a World War II pilot who cracks under pressure, and a fourth Oscar nomination was bestowed upon him.

     Peck continued to have a commanding presence on screen. He was convincing in Westerns; he played a washed up gun for hire aware he's a target himself in The Gunfighter (1950). He starred in sea epics; as the swashbuckling sea captain in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), and convincingly played deranged Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1956). He showed he could act well against Hollywood's leading ladies, such as in Minnelli's Designing Woman (1957) opposite Lauren Bacall in a smart comedy echoing the style of Hepburn and Tracy. One of his best roles was playing the cool romantic reporter holding princess Audrey Hepburn's interest in 1953's Roman Holiday.

     In 1962, he appeared in Cape Fear, with Peck as head of the family menaced by Robert Mitchum. He plays the calm hero and watches Mitchum get his due in the hands of justice, not at the receiving end of Peck's gun in the climactic scene.

     But it was also in 1962 that he was cast as Atticus Finch, the small-town Southern widowed lawyer father of two who defends a black man wrongly accused of rape, in the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird. Amidst the rise of racial turmoil that would sweep over the nation in the 1960s, Peck was able to stand tall playing the role with strength and compassion. He was the epitome of the human condition, sending a message of warm understanding and tolerance during a troubling time.

     "I put everything I had into it - all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children", he once remarked. "And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity".
The Academy Awards honored him for the Best Actor Award for this role, and his most prolific nomination would also be his last.

     As he aged, movie roles grew sparse. He again played the father figure in the 1976 cult horror classic The Omen. 1978's The Boys From Brazil starred Peck as the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. He appeared as a U.S. president in Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987), and as a humane company owner in Other Peoples Money (1991). He had a bit role in the television version of Moby Dick starring Patrick Stewart, and also starred in the TV miniseries The Blue and the Grey as Abraham Lincoln.

     Screen legend Gregory Peck will continue to move audiences beyond today's movie era. He represented all qualities of a true Hollywood leading actor. He was ever the gentleman, active off-screen as well as on, representing the American Cancer Society, National Endowment For The Arts and other numerous, yet notable causes. His life mimicked that of dignified grace, never less than a movie star, never greater than a leading man.

-John Gibbon